The Power of Open Source for Business

Much has been made of the slowdown in tech IPOs in recent years, but that trend appears to be changing in 2017. Of course, there are a few mega-companies that continue to sit on the sidelines (AirBnB, Uber, DropBox, I'm looking at you!) but I think we will continue to see improvements in 2017 and 2018. Perhaps not as strong as the record number of IPOs of 2014, but likely enough to reverse the declining trend from 2015 and 2016.

Early this year we saw IPOs from the likes of Snap, Mulesoft, Aleryx, Okta, Cloudera among others. Other than Snap, which was rather over-hyped, most of the others had very good returns for their investors and are continuing to trade above their IPO price. And overall multiples for tech companies on NASDAQ and NYSE are holding steady. I'm especially encouraged by the performance of B2B software companies Mulesoft, Okta and Cloudera. Mulesoft now has a market cap over $3b and Cloudera and Okta look likely to cross that threshold later this year based on their steady growth and increasing efficiency. It looks like B2B stocks are once again in fashion.

My expectation is we'll see a bit of an IPO slowdown during the summer and then a significant uptick in the fall. For B2B SaaS companies getting to $100m or beyond in annual recurring revenue (ARR), this will be an interesting time.